Romanian crafts are celebrated around the world: fine textiles, carved wooden furniture, ceramics, hammered copper utensils, painted eggs, delicate glasswork, hand-worked leather -- these are among the items traditional Romanian craftsmen have brought to an amazing level of artistry. A directory is included providing a list of the best Romanian artisans, museums, and craft destinations; recommendations on hotel accommodations and restaurants for the traveler; and detailed information for collectors about buying and exporting Romanian crafts.
In recent years, the study of textiles and culture has become a dynamic field of scholarship, reflecting new global, material and technological possibilities. This is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a guide to the major strands of critical work around textiles past and present and to draw upon the work of artists and designers as well as researchers in textiles studies. The handbook offers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to the topics, issues, and questions that are central to the study of textiles today: it examines how material practices reflect cross-cultural influences; it explores textiles' relationships to history, memory, place, and social and technological change; and considers their influence on fashion and design, sustainable production, craft, architecture, curation and contemporary textile art practice. This illustrated volume will be essential reading for students and scholars involved in research on textiles and related subjects such as dress, costume and fashion, feminism and gender, art and design, and cultural history. Cover image: Anne Wilson, To Cross (Walking New York), 2014. Site-specific performance and sculpture at The Drawing Center, NYC. Thread cross research. Photo: Christie Carlson/Anne Wilson Studio.
By examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts, From Storeroom to Stage explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning. Departing from a museum collection in London, the book traces in reverse the journey of these artefacts to the villages where they were made, as well as to other spaces. It also looks at the places where this movement of objects is halted, and the value of the artefacts is put to test.
The many fascinating wonders of Romania, for so long closed to the West, have finally begun to emerge. This illustrated guide includes every tool you need to plan a trip to this most intriguing country in the midst of the new Europe.
Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-si?e culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.
